Born Online, Facebook Now Wants to Be Your ‘Paper’

Print and broadcast news outlets have long been the world’s gatekeepers of information. Now, Facebook wants a turn.

On Thursday, Facebook introduced a long-awaited mobile app, called Paper, that offers users a personalized stream of news. Facebook said it will be available Feb. 3 for the iPhone; there is no date yet for Android.

Instead of editors and reporters, Facebook’s publication is staffed by a computer algorithm and human “curators.” The content comes from outside sources, based on links shared by the social network’s 1.2 billion users. During a recent demonstration, the curated content featured articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time Magazine, among others.

The move is part of Facebook’s long-term strategy to be more than just a popular app, or a destination on the Internet. Facebook wants to be the global hub of human communication, essential in the lives of its users.

It’s also part of a Facebook push to develop a suite of apps that will co-exist alongside the main Facebook app. So far, the effort has had mixed results: CEO Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday said use of Facebook’s Messenger app had increased 70% during the past three months. Facebook’s instant-message Poke app has been less successful. Zuckerberg Wednesday hinted at more apps to come.

Paper, which was demonstrated to The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, is smooth and sleek, performing most of the functions in Facebook’s existing mobile app. But Paper has some important new features, including an interactive way of looking at photos that utilizes gyroscopic and other sensors inside mobile phones. The feature allows users to pan back and forth across a photo simply by moving the phone from side to side.

Paper displays information in segments — such as Headlines, Pop Life, Score, Enterprise and Home – similar to the sections of a newspaper. Clicking on a section opens a preview of articles. Users can open an article by swiping their fingers across it, causing an animation of a piece of paper being peeled back.

The animation and articles in Paper are constantly being loaded in the background, so that swiping through the app happens lightning fast – a feature that works best on newer phones and won’t work on iPhones older than the iPhone 4.

The app, under development since the middle of 2012, was developed by a roughly 15-person unit led by product manager Michael Reckhow and designer Mike Matas, who worked on the Nest thermostat, among other things, before moving to Facebook in 2011.

The app includes a message feature and allows users to browse their news feeds and look at their friends’ profiles. Reckhow said the app gives users an alternate way to use Facebook on their mobile phones, without disrupting people who have gotten used to the old app.